QUOTE (Lynne @ Feb 5 2008, 01:26 AM)

I think I'm entitled to get a bit snarky when I have to keep repeating the same rules over and over and over. Now either this continual snarking of the staff stops, or this thread gets closed.
I think the key issue is by what process the rules around posting of links gets decided. It gets very confusing when there isn't a set of rules concerning video linking (that ought to be decided upon democratically, by the way, involving as many people in the discussion who wish to contribute to it, as long as it is respectful and doesn't devolve into personal attacks) at the very beginning of this thread. This would avoid confusion when it comes to continually evolving rules issues, like this anime business, that haven't come up before. I personally don't understand how there could be an issue surrounding cartoons, because real people are not involved. They're fake. Regardless of what age the moving-pictures are representing, they are still just that...representations. No real people are involved, because the voices doing the animation *are* the characters they are playing, at least during the length of the show.
If consent is the legal issue surrounding fetish material postings, then technically we have no one's consent to post links to their videos here, regardless of their ages. Then again, as has been argued repeatedly, once videos get posted on public domain websites, what other people do while watching those videos is in the personal domain. Legally speaking, not a single video linked on this site is pornographic material: not everyone gets sexually aroused by the videos, and even if they did, the material itself isn't pornographic... if people wanted to <insert your favorite euphemism for 'doing whatever it is they care to do' here> to photos of racehorses conceiving foals, no FBI swat team is going to bust into their houses and arrest them, because photos of horses giving birth is simply not pornographic content, regardless of how some creative folk might choose to interpret them. Besides, how could it be proven? This is why it is the *content* that must be explicit... otherwise, it becomes policing of a moral issue, and moral issues that aren't encoded into law should be policed solely by the individual concerned.
To be more blunt, and to avoid being accused with my metaphor above of equating bestiality and sneeze fetishism, which no doubt will happen anyway, what I am saying is this: if a video or photo in our possessions has explicit pornographic content under the law, we can get in trouble. If the video does not contain such, then we as individuals living a still (barely) democratic society have a right to collect and view whatever it is that interests us, and engage in whatever behaviour we choose while doing so. If there is a legal concern with the forum being shut down because of video linkage, then there are other less public ways on here that people can maintain updates for the benefits of other members' knowledge: more hassle, yes, but more freedom....
Just some nagging thoughts, it helps me to sort them out if I voice them in dialogue with others.